Well, that was a lollapalooza that the European Commissioner for Competition Margrethe Vestager dropped on the audience at the Digital Life Design conference now under way in Munich, Germany.

Her comments, delivered on the conference’s first day as the keynote speech, were also something of a head scratcher, as an unkind observer might conclude that she doesn’t understand what Big Data has become.

What She Said

Vestager said that the EC was considering looking at Big Data from a competitive perspective, according to a report of her speech by Reuters.

Data privacy, of course, is one of the EC’s primal issues but what Vestager seems to be saying is that Big Data should be a competitive concern as well. As in, it would not be fair for one or a few companies to collect and hold all of the world’s Big Data. For example, according to Reuters, she said:

If just a few companies control the data you need to satisfy customers and cut costs, then you can give them the power to just drive rivals out of the market.

If we analyze a merger, if we have a suspicion or concern when it comes to antitrust, if it comes to data, of course we will look at it. It may be a competition problem.

If a company's use of data is so bad for competition that it outweighs the benefit, then you may have to step in to restore the level playing field.

Now, granted these are excerpts from a much larger speech she gave, filtered through Reuters’ reporting. But other publications covered the speech and came back with similar quotes.

From the New York Times: "If a few companies control the data you need to cut costs, then you give them the power to drive others out of the market."

And the Wall Street Journal: Vestager said that EU would look into why some companies can’t acquire information that is as useful as the data that other competing firms have. “What’s to stop them [companies] from collecting the same data from their customers, or buying it from a data-analytics company?” she said.

Google, Amazon, Apple

Anyone following the EC’s antitrust commission knows exactly which companies Vestager must believe is hoarding all the world’s consumer data: Google, of course. Amazon, Apple, and possibly just for old time’s sake, Microsoft. Facebook. IBM should be on that list too, even though it has managed to escape much of the commission’s investigative wrath in recent years. A few months ago, after all, IBM secured a massive dataset with the acquisition of the Weather Channel.

To be sure the aforementioned do have enviable datasets but they do not have a monopoly on data. And it is worrisome that Vestager would think that any entity does. There are, in fact, countless sources of data sets many of which are public and free. To name some random examples: